


Close Encounters of the Human Kind

by Blurble



Category: humans are space orcs - Fandom
Genre: (not really enemies so much as "general dislike to tolerance to respect to friends"?), Enemies to Friends, Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27961001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blurble/pseuds/Blurble
Summary: A human! Oh, I was regretting not going fungal when I'd had the chance.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 60
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Close Encounters of the Human Kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NaomiK](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NaomiK/gifts).



It should have been the happiest day of my life.

I had completed the four cycles of FedCen cross-cultural training. I had completed three cycles of the Thesis From Hell. I had completed one cycle of Applied and Theoretical Astrophysics and four cycles of Applied Theory in Simulated Missions. I had worked myself into an oozing lather, and I had ranked first in class. I had done all of this because first in class traditionally was awarded provisional command of their own ship. I was finally graduating, and I, DRI-47WER, was going to spaaaaace!

...The human was also graduating. It was difficult not to notice, given the giant banners everywhere announcing the first human graduate from FedCen1. I was graduating with the highest scores in a hectocycle but of course _that_ was not noteworthy at all.

I’d only met the human once, as our course selections had ended up without any overlap, especially because of the accelerated track she was pursuing. I just heard about the human, a lot. Especially because my supposed “expertise” in humans2 meant people kept coming to me with all the wildly inappropriate questions they had enough social sense to not inflict directly on the human.

The human had a name, of course. Like all human names, it was completely unpronounceable, produced through a combination of air vibrating against internal meat-strings and some additional meat percussion before being forced through a meat hole that was reshaped in various ways to modify the sound waves.

By the way, despite having having perfectly functional (albeit bone-filled) tentacles at the end of all four of her limb appendages, the human consistently failed at pronouncing the 4 or the 7 of my name correctly during the one brief conversation we’d shared.

My best friend, Akkstasska— who is actually, physiologically, incapable of having an unkind thought— had chided me about my negativity towards the human multiple times. Having arguments with a sentient hyperspatial crystal whose only existence is universal love and transcendent joy is a waste of time, so I always changed the subject.

It’s not like I had anything specifically against that specific human. I was just a little tired of the topic of humans in general. Call it post-thesis burnout.

Anyway the point is I was graduating first rank, and all my dreams were about to come true, and the human and I were going to be many, many light years apart, and I should have been very happy.

Instead I was fielding questions from the group of high-ranking Jobrkhg diplomats I’d been assigned to accompany to the ceremony about, what else, humans. One of them had recognized my name from that paper I’d written back in Sennies and that had set the whole lot of them off.

“I heard humans will exchange organs with each other, is that true?” The Jobrkhg nearest me asked.

I’d heard something similar, so I nodded cautiously. Have I mentioned that I’m not actually an expert on humans? I’m not.

“I heard they have little demons in their circulatory fluid that can eat micro-organisms”.

That sounded vaguely possible. I nodded along, waiting for the conversation to be over.

“I heard that they create small stuffed models of predator species from their planet, and then give them to their infants to help them sleep at night!”

Just then I saw Glob, accompanying her own group of guests.

“And this is my friend and classmate Glob,” I said, loud and overly cheery. “She did research on adaptational methods for species cohabitation and will be able to answer your questions while I take a brief moment for some personal needs.”

Glob gave me a look that said she wasn’t buying it, but like a true friend she gamely took over managing the Jobrkhg group while I slipped away.

I was allowed to request crew mates for the ship I’d be assigned after graduation. I’d requested Akkstasska and Glob.

In my earliest days at FedCen, when I’d been miserable with Cross-Cultural Shock, debating just going fungal and screw it all, Akkstaska had adopted me as a friend. She’d taken me to green, slow, whispering places where I could feel less disoriented and out of my own skin. Then she’d taken me to fun but not too overwhelming places to try ingesting fun but not too overwhelming new palapf. She’d eased me through the hardest stage of my life, and I loved her dearly for it, even though looking at her too directly sometimes made me dizzy.

We’d stayed close friends even during the multiple course separations and ups and downs of our very different training paths. I’d known all along I wanted her on my crew.

I’d met Glob in applied astrophysics, when her sysop track and my captain’s track overlapped. Glob was from a somewhat homologous sentient type to my own, which made her relatively comfortable to spend time with compared to some of the weirder, more disorienting variety FedCen had to offer. Although she photosynthesized _chlorine._ (She mostly stayed inside a biohab suit which provided the right atmosphere for her needs).

She joined my training crew and we worked together excellently. She was smooth and reliable and we’d made a point of trying to co-train together after that.

I’d be getting at least one additional crewmate, possibly two, but I hadn’t been able to decide who I wanted for the other slot and it wasn’t as if my requests were guaranteed to be fulfilled anyway. I felt pretty confident I’d get along with whoever.

I did rather pity whoever got the first ever graduated human on their crew, though.

* * *

I circled back to the Jobhrgk delegation and Glob eventually. Akkstasska, who wasn’t assigned to accompany anyone but her own circle-members, had floated over to join them.

There was a security check at the entrance to the hall, which I didn’t recall from last cycle’s ceremony.

“There’s been rumors of student involvement with Crellc smugglers,” Akkstaska said, when I mentioned it to her.

“There are always rumors, and it’s always nonsense,” Glob said. “There’s probably some other reason.”

We got our guests seated and proceeded to the standing area for graduates, near the stage. Various formal ceremonies ensued. Each of the graduates got their FedCen pincard.

Finally the Elbrig running the event announced me as the student who'd ranked first, and called me up to stage. There were polite waves of congratulations lights from the audience, and Akkstaska flashed a vivid bright purple that illuminated a radius of four seats around her.

I had a quick statement to say, just some generic thanks, but the Elbrig continued talking even after I was on stage, going on and on about my academic record, and my research, including my “groundbreaking research into human archival and communication systems”, and the improvements I’d written for the crosslink device… Getting a basic threader’s captain’s lock wasn’t normally accompanied by this much fanfare and I was getting uncomfortable.

“...And that is why we feel DRI-47WER is uniquely suited to have our first ever human graduate join her on her first mission!”

There was another wave of shining lights from the audience. Some of the humans, who had clearly not properly internalized their culture training, also made very loud noises.

I stood there, my prepared remarks vanished from my head. I didn’t know where to put myself. My tentacles felt floppy.

The human came on stage. MY stage! My brief shining moment of getting captain and there was someone else there. The human! Oh, I was regretting not going fungal when I had the chance.

The human introduced herself to the audience. More lights from the crowd. She towered over both me and the Elbrig, her head brushing against the lightsphere that had been suspended in the air above us. When the Elbrig gave her a welcoming smile he had to crane his head all the way back to make eye contact. I kept my eyes fixed on the audience.

The Elbrig ceremoniously handed me my captain's lock and began chanting the genelock transfer protocol. With no other option before me, I graciously accepted my position, graciously accepted my assignment, graciously kept all my tentacles folded graciously the entire gracious time, and fled straight for the restpads when the ceremony was over.

* * *

I had expected to get the standard junior assignee threader, in fact I'd even brought Glob and Akkstasska to look at the one I assumed I was getting when I got the official confirmation of my ranking. But because of the constraints imposed by the human’s size, my first ship wasn’t a standard threader at all, but a special custom-sized one.

Glob insisted on spending a day prying it open and checking it out, grumbling something about non-standard fittings. Glob wasn't officially ship engineer so it wasn't really her responsibility, but I decided not to interfere. She'd had been acting a little weird since the graduation— I knew Glob was creeped out by humans, and I assumed she was upset about the assignment and distracting herself to cope. I myself was still not really adjusted to the idea of having the human on my crew so I didn't feel like I could judge,

Our first decicycles in space were nice and uneventful. For the first stage of the trip we didn’t fly the needle at all. Instead we and the needle were all cargo on a megasailer, half the size of an average moon but with 80% of that size composed of solar sails. There was plenty of room left in the remaining 20% even with cargo. It was no luxury resort sailer, it was distinctly a cargo-trawler, but the projected windows simulation of the outside interstellar view was beautiful and made my skin itch with longing3.

With not much to do on the command side of things, I let myself enjoy the feeling of my first real space journey (elevator jumps to Koros and Peliphae didn’t count) since starting at FedCen.

From the megasailer we arrived at the Agroxyc terminus, which collected short term jumps to over sixteen different key wormholes. The terminus was planet sized and entirely artificial, a hollow tetrahedron crawling with activity. I sent a routine update via the commlinks to the mission control. I bought fourteen different kinds of palapf, none of which I could take onto the needle with me so I just gorged myself on the spot.

It took two decicycles for the needle to be unloaded and then we were hitched onto a trawler and sent through wormspace. Wormspace is filled with none of the deep sweet longing of true space. Wormspace feels like having your brain squeezed through a teltek but very, very slowly.

I opted for the knockout option and spent the time unconscious.

I’ll spare you the tedious accounts of the next five worm-jumps, once the sheer delight of space started to wear off a bit. Glob handled the diagnostics, Akkstasska ran the navigation, I did administration, and in between engineering maintenance shifts the human kept sneaking off to the AI terminal to run some kind of cross-tabulations on the cargo management software because of some problem she was convinced we were having.

But although work was proceeding smoothly, the atmosphere was still a bit... awkward. I'd be talking to Glob about something and then the human would come hulking in and the conversation would sort of peter out. And when the human and I were alone together I couldn't really think of anything to say except stilted talk about the mission. 

Akkstasska’s chiding about my insufficiently welcoming behavior went from general platitudes about the importance of love and tolerance among species to specific comments about how the human was feeling sad and culture-shocked and I should be nicer to her.

I scoffed. “Humans are low-shock,” I said, with the confidence of someone who knew.

“Fine,” she said, “call it planetlonging, it’s still everything unfamiliar and being entirely isolated from others of your kind.”

“...Why do you know this? Have you been talking to her?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.

“Of course I’ve been talking to her! We’re friends!” 

I felt a stab of betrayal. Akkstasska was _my_ friend. She wasn’t supposed to be cozying up with the human!

Akkstasska as usual picked up on my mood somehow. She went a soft purple-green. 

“Oh, Dri,” she said, “if it’s because of thesis trauma, the medunit—”

“Right, I’m not having this conversation,” I said. I turned and left. 4

* * *

So the human was spending lots of time with Akkstasska and I was convinced they were having too much fun together and becoming best friends behind my back. 

Also, the human kept trying to catch me alone and start a whispered conversation with me. I strongly suspected it was because Akkstasska had told her about my thesis trauma and encouraged her to “talk to me about it” or some other such Akkstasska nonsense, so outside of our very, very professional interactions at crew meetings I avoided the human as much as I possibly could.

Three jumps later Aksstasska had enough.

We were at Col7778, the last stop we’d be making before doing a straight series of jumps to our needling destination. Col7778 is too far out in the far arm of the galaxy away from everyone to have pretensions to being a resort planet, and yet nonetheless has such pretensions in large quantities. Some rich Druklab had set up camp in the place as his vacation home two hundred cycles back, and invested obscene amounts of money building up three matter generators to compensate for the total lack of a decent jumphole nearby. So now it was a haven for weird but pampered recluses who wanted to be far away from everyone but not from familiar comforts. Tordoe had written his famous poem about reconnecting with the wilds there, while a Vasbot did his laundry, so now the place was also infested with wannabe poets, philosophers, and romantics.

I am mentioning all of this because it’s relevant to what happened next.

“I have had enough,” Akkstasska said, in her usual radiant tones of love and patience that could nonetheless make you feel distinctly ashamed of yourself. “The human’s planetlonging is filling her head with weird theories and paranoia, and you are acting more avoidant than a klee snail. So we are going to go, together, to spend some time in a recreational capsule. We will leave when you are on speaking terms with each other and not one millisec beforehand, I am invoking first mate privilege”.

Glob refused to come, and said she'd stay and watch the ship. Akkstasska's disapproval had never really worked on her, but it meant Akkstasska looked extra-expectantly at me, leaving me no way to back out.

So we went. 

We told the capsule our species identifiers. Akkstasska asked it for the theme “light, frothy, fun”. The human looked around in bemusement, having apparently never seen a recreational capsule before. In fairness, they’re not common in the central planets.

“They’re very safe,” Akkstasska reassured her. I myself was beginning to have my doubts, as the capsule was emitting very weird gurgle-grunt noises.

Then the placeset opened up and our trays were delivered — a sugar crystal water mixture for Akkstasska, a bottle of golden colored liquid with a strong, acrid smell for the human, and for me, a blackish greenish blob of slime, something I’d never seen before.

“Uh,” I said, suddenly filled with the urge to leave.

Akkstaska had already dipped herself into her crystal mixture and was humming contentedly.

For some reason I looked at the human, squeezed uncomfortably into the too-small seat of the capsule. She was contemplating the bottle in front of her like it was her own personal death, and the sudden fellow-feeling I felt with her alarmed me so much I jabbed my tentacle directly into the blob.

_...some vague, undefined time later..._

“What I’m saying is… What I’m saying…” I waved my tentacles, having briefly forgotten how to compose a sentence in Common.

“Right, what I’m saying is that humans are, are, Theske— the, ah, you know, the hot thing with the energy. The glowy thing.”

“Fire?” The human suggested.

“Right, that, and the other thing, the combustion-boom... explosions! Humans are maniacs for fire and explosions! This is why they are insane!”

“Pyromaniacs,” the human said. I had no idea what the word meant, but did not let that deter me from warming up into my rant.

“They light things on fire! It is unsafe! They light everything on fire!”

“I think that’s a bit unfair—” Akkstasska began, giving a protective glance at the human.

“No, no, let her continue,” the human said, “she clearly needs to get it out of her system.”

“Fire!” I said. “Do you know that humans will ingest things that have had fire applied to them to the point of carbonization? They like this! They will sometimes refuse to eat something unless it has been altered with fire!”

Akkstasska gave a skeptical whirr.

“I have definitely seen humans eating food without fire. Also all our ship rations are normal and you totally eat those, right?” she asked, turning towards the human for confirmation.

The human nodded. I flicked a tentacle dismissively.

“I didn’t say they _can’t_ eat without fire, but they prefer eating with it. Do you know, before humans got anti-grav tech from the Mesmores, what the most common form of accelerated transportation was on their planet?”

“Gliding?” Akkstasska suggested. I waved dismissively at her.

“Exploding things! They built a box with wheels on it and then they would explode stuff to make the wheels turn! They would sit inside the explodey box!”

“Maybe you’re getting mixed up with how humans first did space travel,” Akkstasska said. She was still trying to hover away the slime I had in front of me, but I grabbed it closer, in the process squeezing some more onto my skin, where it was quickly absorbed. The stuff was incredible. Incredible. I dipped a tentacle in for a bit more.

“I am not mixing it up with their— their— the things that went into space! This was completely gravity bound! They were just doing explosions to go fast! Sometimes they’d go too fast and die and also the explodey box would light on fire. Although they did also have low gravity projectile devices and guess what? Those were also on fire! I did research on this!”

“Right, I think you maybe just mistranslated something—” Akkstasska began, but the human interrupted her.

“No, she’s telling the truth,” she said. “Cars and airplanes, we used combustion engines for them. I mean, we eventually switched to other forms of energy but it was combustion for a while.”

Akkstasska turned lightly green with shock, but managed to quickly recover back to a more polite pink-grey. “Every alien culture has some peculiarities,” she said. “You can’t judge one out-of-context example when you don’t have the cultural background.”

I reached a tentacle out and gripped her lightly at the base rock formation. “You don’t understand,” I hissed. “I have done— I have done the cultural immersion. I have done So Much cultural immersion. I have seen sights the mind was not meant to process. Do you know what a “blowtorch” is? Because I do. If we had a proper net linkup I would get you a cross-communication device and I would show you one. And then I would show you humans using them. Do you know that humans like to light things on fire for fun?”

“Cultural immersion can still be missing necessary context,” Akkstasska insisted. “Just because you didn’t know the relevant purpose doesn’t mean it was ‘for fun’, DRI-47WER.”

“They said straight out it was for fun,” I said. “They took these things called fireworks— you’ve never heard of fireworks, Akkstasska, because your species is very sane— they took thousands of these fireworks, and then they put them in one of their travel explodey boxes, and then they lit them on fire. Do you know that sometimes they’d bring their carbonized food out while it was still in flames and serve it that way? I looked it up and it wasn’t even a necessary part of the cooking process, they just liked things being on fire! Do you know, they’d sometimes light a big fire and gather a bunch of other humans around it and just spend time around the fire doing weird fire human bonding rituals or— or something— “

I faltered a little, having gotten a bit out of my depth with the communal fire topic. “Arc welding!” I said, having remembered another point. “Once we’re done with this mission I am going to send you a video of arc-welding!”

“I am not being drawn into your ridiculous prejudice against humans,” Akkstasska said.

“No, no, she has a point,” the human said. “I admit I’ve never thought of it that way before but, we do sit around a big fire and then light food on fire to eat it.”

“I am not fighting the two of you at once,” Akkstasska said huffily. I didn’t know she could do huffy. The marvels of the things the capsule had brewed up! Maybe all of Akkstasska’s universal love and transcendent joy had been psy-transferred to me somehow, because I was feeling remarkably at peace with the universe and everything in it. In fact, I felt so at peace.. So.. Peace… I swayed forward lightly, lay my head down, and slept.

* * *

Every one of my folae felt like it was on fire, a sensation I hadn’t experienced since my sporing.

“Oh, crestenations,” I said, my voice sounding strange to my ears. Hoarse? I was hoarse? My tentacles felt cramped. My brain felt like it had exploded.

Regretfully, the memories began filtering back, shamefaced wretches.

There had definitely been something very, very wrong with that capsule, I thought. I was going to find the manufacturer and personally drag him through a grueling court process in front of the entire Federation. I was going…

Someone tapped on the door of my quarters.

I groaned, which was apparently understood as permission to enter.

The human walked in, softly.

“I thought you could use this,” she said. She was holding what looked like gorladge but somehow grosser and less leafy.

“I am not eating any other mystery substances right now,” I said.

“This should help,” she said. “Really. I, uh, did research.”

I looked at her skeptically but she wasn’t going away and honestly the thought of arguing with her made the room spin. Or maybe it was spinning anyway.

I ingested the not-gorladge.

I shivered all over in a huge wave and something black oozed from my folae. It was disgusting. It was awful.

And then I felt so much better I almost wanted to moult.

“Wow,” I said, instead. “Thank you.”

I couldn’t even remember why I had ever disliked the human — Margo — my wonderful saving angel.

Margo did something with her face that made me realize I had said that last bit out loud.

“I mean, other than you wanting to talk to me about cultural understanding and tentacles and, and, uh, rule 34,” I said, in an attempt to salvage the situation.

As salvage attempts go, it— failed, horribly.

Margo’s eyes wrinkled together and her mouth fell open. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been chasing me around the ship for?” I said. Having dug myself into this hole, I figured the only way out was to keep digging furiously. Eventually I’d breach a hull and we’d all die.

“...No, I want to talk to you about the irregularities I’ve noticed in the ship stock measurements,” Margo said, after a long, long pause. “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?”

“I have some thesis trauma,” I offered.

“Right.” She said. “...What’s rule 34?”

“Anyway! Stock measurement irregularities! Fascinating! Tell me more!” I said.

She explained how the energy expenditure levels weren’t matching up with what was expected, in subtle ways it was easy to ignore as calculation errors, but she’d retried her calculations three times, and then finally she’d gone to physically measure the stock room.

“Well, I tried, but both times Glob was there and told me off really aggressively for wasting time,” she said. I frowned. That did not sound like standard Glob behavior.

“We’ll look into it together,” I said. "I'll let Glob know."

I sent Glob a quick message. There was a long delay before she responded, saying it would be better to open the stock rooms once we were off-planet. I didn't understand her reasoning but we were jumping soon, so I sent a quick confirmation and then went to find Akkstasska in the pilot's bay. The human came along.

* * *

We had a series of seven jumps planned. The first one was small and uneventful, and we took a quick pause and then headed into the second, longer one. Akkstasska pressed the jump through without an indication of problems. The coordinates were for an empty uninteresting patch of space near an oort cloud.

But when we arrived, the shield breach alarms went off.

It could have been stray space dust, or it could have been an attack.

The computers indicated a hailing signal. I opened up transmission.

“Let us board, load cargo, and we’ll let you peacefully go on your way,” a scratchy voice demanded. I tried to place the accent through the deliberate garbling, maybe Oooklan?

“If not,” the voice continued, going low and menacing, but I stopped listening. I signaled Akkstasska with my head. She was tense at the maneuvering controls.

“548,” I whispered. That was an exercise we’d run three years back.

Akkstasska nodded. I went over to the auxiliary command to hook myself into the safety subroutines. It took me a moment, so in the meantime Akkstasska stalled them.

“Look, we’re just running a threading mission, we don’t have anything valuable. We can’t let you board because of Federation protocol but we can just peacefully part ways without incident, and won’t even have to report you to the authorities,” she lied.

“Or we can just deadlock your ship and board-and-blast you,” the voice said.

But by then Akkstasska had hooked into the autopilot, and we began stretching the technical limits of what was allowed in a needle ship. The voice over the comms took a moment to register what was happening and then went indignant.

“What - You can’t do tha—” it started to protest, and then was cut off, because we’d gained enough clearance for a microjump and now we were on the other side of the cloud.

The whole thing was over in a quinticycle, tops. I unhooked carefully from the subroutines. The wave of energy excitement that filled me had nowhere to go, so I tapped my tentacles just to let it out. The human gave a whoop. Akkstasska was glowing gently.

“I cannot wait to brag about that one in mission review,” I said. “Akkstasska, let’s recalculate coordinates for how we’re going to need to adjust our jumps now that we’re off-shifted. I’ll make a report to mission control but let’s first check out what was bothering Margo.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” Glob said. She’d appeared, soundlessly, from behind the command partition. In the robo-arm attached to her tank she was holding a very, very illegal and contraband zapknife. I didn’t have time to react before the knife was being held at the base of my folae.

“You!” The human said. “Oh, I should have—”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” Glob said, almost sad. “We could have just let the ‘pirates’ board and gone home minus a few creds, none the wiser. You wouldn’t have even known about the crellc. A small demerit on your career rankings for the mission failure, nothing you couldn’t overcome in a few cycles. But now I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Akkstasska said.

“Shut up,” Glob said.

Still keeping the knife on me, she used a second arm to pull out a magswerv and ran it through the comms unit. Akkstasska was still hooked in. The unit emitted an ear-splitting whine, and Akkstasska began to vibrate horribly.

Then she turned a dull black and crashed to the floor.

I had trained for so many scenarios in the Federations sims. Pirates, spontaneously forming black holes, solar storms... But never anything like this. I felt paralyzed, not just physically but mentally.

The human, on the other hand, went crazy.

“I’ll kill you,” the human said. There was something liquid dripping from her eyes, making them shine glossily, dark and terrifying. “I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the galaxy and then I'll-- Then I'll make every single horrible thing you’ve heard about humans come true.”

She had always stooped in the ship, making herself a little closer to our height, but now she stood fully straight. She took a step forward.

Glob, still holding me, took a step back.

“LET GO OF THE CAPTAIN!!!” The human roared. Some kind of liquidy projectile spewed out of her mouth onto biohab glass. Glob flinched backwards as whatever it was trickled down.

I was pretty sure the rumor that humans could release acid was fake, but maybe I was wrong? Regardless, it gave me my opportunity. My moment of numbness had passed, my courage bolstered by the human’s rage. I twisted, dropped, and then slammed Glob across the infra-juncture of her suit. Her robo-arms jerked involuntarily and the zap-knife went spinning.

She turned and sped away.

The human dropped down next to Akkstasska. I chased after Glob. But she’d prepared her escape route in advance, and every single one of the emergency pods launched with her.

* * *

Neither Margo nor I knew anything about crystal medical care. We placed Akkstasska into a medcan, and the indicator light turned blue, which meant she was alive, and stable. Other than that we didn’t know what to do.

The cargo bay had been ransacked, things ripped out of their riggings and thrown everywhere. The false gravity had been disabled, so we had to float through the debris to examine the damage. There were hidden panels in the walls. Glob must have added them back when she'd insisted on "checking over" the ship. Which meant all along, Glob had been smuggling.

The escape pods were gone. The comms and nav units were completely busted. We were stranded, a hop away from our planned route, in a ship dead-in-the-aether.

Things could have been worse! The life support systems were still functioning just fine and had another hundred cycles in them at least. We were a sitting target for any pirates passing by, but there were none.

My attempts at maintaining a cheerful attitude were not successful. Akkstasska was lying still and silent. Glob had betrayed us. We had no idea if or when a rescue might be coming.

“But hey, at least I added trackers to all the pods,” the human said.

I didn’t see how that made our situation any better. We were due at our needle point in another fifteen decicycles. Fifteen decicycles after that we’d be due for a check-in, the earliest time for someone to notice we’d gone missing and something was wrong. So thirty decicycles at least. And then however long it took to retrace our route. And then however long it took for them to spread the search out from our route, and figure out the random jump we’d made across the cloud.

Just thinking about it was driving me slowly insane. But I needed to stay sane. So I composed detailed mission logs of everything that had happened, every piece of evidence we’d missed about Glob that we pieced together now, anything useful. Margo helped with that, and she also introduced me to a human entertainment called “card games”. I enjoyed them, so I showed her how slapstickle worked, which she found hilarious.

It was still just the two of us, alone on the too-quiet broken down ship. Time passed like treacle tar. Margo told me about her family back on the human home planet. I told her about my early days at the academy.  5

Alas, we were tense and miserable, so in between all the games and bonding we also fought repeatedly.

“Right, I can’t stand this anymore,” Margo said, after an argument in which I’d dragged my tentacles across the ruined comms so that they shrieked while the human screamed at me. “Let’s try pulsing the neutron core to send an SOS”.

“... _What?_ ” I said.

The neutron core of a needler ship, used for making jumps, had a chemically inert shell making it perfectly, totally safe. The human wanted to use the carbacite in our food generator to chemically react with the core, so that instead of it being inert, safe, and stable, it would become radioactive and also capable of sending massive energy pulses out omnidirectionally. Then we’d strategically lower and raise the ship shielding to transform the energy pulses into an SOS code.

“So that is completely insane, and we will not be doing it,” I said. “We can sit tight for a few more decicycles until help comes. And do our best not to murder each other in our sleep.”

But one shift later, the indicator on Akkstasska’s medcan went from blue to orange. Something was wrong.

“The medcan is shielded,” Margo said. “And we can rig up shielding for ourselves from the cargo plas’s, not like they’re doing anything now anyway.”

Would I have done it if my best friend wasn’t dying in the room next door? No. But she was. So we rigged up shield pods for ourselves and an extra layer of shielding for Akkstasska just in case. And then I got to be a personal eyewitness to humans and their madness.

Ha! That’s a lie. I wasn’t an eyewitness. I was an active participant! I touched the carbacite rod to the fuel rings myself, while the human was maneuvering the shields. There were sparks of flame.

The truth is, it was... exhilarating.

More importantly, it worked! It was completely insane, but it worked. We reached comms units as far as _Tauri_.

Multiple starry-eyed engineers have written research papers trying to demonstrate methods for safely and non-insanely replicating what we accomplished. We may have accidentally solved the FTL communication problem.

But that was later. More immediately, we got a return signal on the short-comm transponder, the only one still half-functional on the receiving end. It could have been pirates, but it wasn’t. A LlllLLLiliaan miner ship had picked up on our signal and they were headed our way.

“You know what this means, right?” Margo asked me, as I finally stepped away from the sparking carbacite to coordinate lock-on points with the miner. My folae were still lightly fizzing from the adrenaline rush.

“What?” I asked, wariness making its way through the rush of success. She was baring her teeth at me, eyes crinkled, what the humans call a “grin”. It was not a look that boded well.

“You’re also a pyromaniac now!” Margo said to me, with glee.

_Postscript_

  
Once we were on the miner ship and headed for the nearest med center, I had time to contemplate the shattered ruins of the career I’d fought for my entire life. It was unlikely I’d ever be allowed on a Federation ship again, not in crew capacity at least. I wondered if I could become a palapf farmer.

But then the human handed over the radio frequencies for the bugs she’d planted on the escape pods and the Federation was able to successfully use them to follow Glob’s lead to an entire nest of Crellc smugglers. Somehow both the human and I earned a commendation for that.

Akkstasska recovered almost completely from the reverbational frequency shock she’d experienced, but the doctors recommended she not pilot again. I felt horrible and sick with guilt, but she said she’d been hesitating about staying on the pilot track for over four cycles.

“But you said—” I began, and she cut me off.

“You had always planned for us to fly together,” she said. “And I didn’t want to disappoint you, so I never told you my doubts. But I’ve already gotten an invitation to join a humming circle. I was going to tell you after we finished the mission, I wanted to fly with you at least once. I’m happy, Dri, don’t be sad for me.”

I tried to perk my folae but it couldn’t be helped. They drooped. I missed her already.

“I’m glad I’m not leaving you alone,” she said. “I’m really happy you and the human are friends, Dri. Both of you need to keep in touch with me.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I have a comms packet to send you, send me your new address at the circle.”

I did not give a small, evil wiggle.

But after everything settled down, I finally had a chance to get myself into a crosslink communication device again. It took me a little while to cross from there to the human internet, but from there it took a very, very short time to find what I was looking for. It’s not very hard to find at all.

I enclosed the audiovisual datastreams and a little accompanying introduction 6 into a crystal beam and sent them to Akkstasska. I figured the universal love could use some spicing up, right?

* * *

* * *

* * *

  
1\. **A brief history of humans in FedCen** :  
Federation policy was to leave discovered sentients alone until they independently achieved interstellar space travel and, more importantly, decided to stick with it. But some spacefaring sentients do not follow Federation policy.

The Agnishka had been booted from the Federation after multiple violations of the Territorial Claim Neutrality Provision and were one of the most dominant terrors of the OutFed Agglomeration.

The Agnishka landed in a stealthed gravitational reverser engine and sent a delegate to the nearest human representative to present their territorial claims. With thick, luxurious fur fluffed to an intimidating length, the Agnishka (no official accounts record their name, but widespread rumor says it was Commander Nuffles, famous for ruthless negotiation in the Kalder accords and mysteriously disappeared shortly after the human encounter) approached the nearest human representative to observe the formalities of receiving a territorial surrender.

“You have four days to offer a counter-negotation...” the Agnishka said into the universal communication transmitter.

Unfortunately for the Agnishka, humans were not fitted with universal communication receivers.

“Ooof, you’re adorable!” The human representative said, and then lifted the Agnishka into the air and made close contact between the flesh of both of their bodies in an extensive fashion. Before the horrified observers’ eyes the human opened its ingestion orifice and began repeatedly miming ingestion-like motions against the Agnishka’s body.

The Agnishka hissed and, twisting from the humans arms, fled for its ship. The territorial negotiations were over. By the end of a millicycle the Agnishka had signed a unilateral territorial transfer and fled to the Federation for protection, paying fines for their entire history of prior violations willingly.

Meanwhile the humans proceeded to defeat the Flarf, the Mesmores, and the Glomms. Finally the Federation was forced to declare a special convention and step in.

The humans were offered cross-cultural remedial education, a unanimous resolution passed to arrange for the humans to be brought quickly up to speed on why they needed to stop “hugging”, “snuggling”, or “taking pictures of” other spacefarers if they didn’t want their territorial claims to expand so rapidly the federation would be forced to exterminate them. Regardless of if the spacefarers looked like human-local “pokemon” and unrelated to the human sensors for a chemical property called “cuteness”. No hugging. None.

The humans accepted.  [ ^ ]

  
2\. I had nothing of the kind. I did one thesis cycle on human communication systems that somehow became widely cited and suddenly people were treating me like I’d done a ten-cycle immersion observation. [ ^ ]

  
3\. My species are encouraged to not proceed into later stages of our lifecycle, because unless properly managed, the later stages involve becoming planet-sized mushroom trees that destroy whatever object— asteroid, moon, planet— we are anchored in as fuel for the release of an entire wave of new spores. The risk of accidental planetary genocide is also why our space travel once we hit the mycelium stage is strictly limited. We all long for space on an instinctive level. Only the lucky ones get to fulfill our longing before going fungal. [ ^ ]

  
4\. My very tiny itty bitty human-related thesis trauma:

Every space-faring species undergoes culture shock. You are used to the comfortable and right ways of your world and then you are introduced to many forms of Very Wrong things. There’s a reason the federation has a policy of non-interference. In the past, entire species would commit self-xenocide upon encountering aliens.

After my own sporing, even though I had been prepared by my treemother, I nonetheless had to spend my mandatory millirote in one of the Federation’s education centers studying sims of the hundreds of known spacefarers. It was a deeply uncomfortable time for me, lonely, miserable, and frequently sick with disgust, but spores must be civilized to survive and I made it through. Akkstasska helped, tremendously.

Some species had other reactions. Akkstasska’s crystals had never had any difficulty adjusting, they just slotted each new revolting species into their beautiful framework of family and wonder.

As for the humans. The human reaction was… the human reaction… In the same way that crystals have the IThpsace or spores have the wide spread, humans have an “internet”, which I recommend you never use a crosslink communication device to browse. When I was a foolish sporeling I wrote a research paper about the internet, which was one of those terrible life decisions you make and your thesis advisor doesn’t stop you because they’re a Darkith and pure evil and ever since it became illegal to devour your kind whole they’ve had to find other ways to direct their aggression. On the one hand, it traumatized me, on the other hand… I had seen rule 34, it had nothing to do with the correct spacing of one’s trinary tentacles when greeting an elder. It was a trial by fire and by the end nothing could truly phase me ever again.

But then they were so impressed with my research they assigned a human to my first crew…  [ ^ ]

  
5\. At some point we also had a conversation about rule 34. Margo had apparently sneaked some of the weird goo away from the capsule, which facilitated my ability to even have the conversation and means that my recollection of most of it is thankfully blurred.

I do, unfortunately, remember Margo's attempt at comforting me once I was finished explaining.

"If it makes you feel better," she said, "I am not attracted to you for reproductive purposes. But..."

"But what?"

"I gotta admit you're adorable. Sorry."

...For obvious reasons I pretended to forget that bit along with all the rest. Humans are horrifying. I can only credit my extensive cross-cultural training for my ability to maintain the friendship after that.[ ^ ]

6\. The introduction was just "I told you so". With the proper data connection, it's not like it's hard to prove that [humans ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erQ_9yEz0ls) [just ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx7iijLIItM) [really](https://youtu.be/n_CJ7jVNi2U?t=436) [ really ](https://youtu.be/CoHVA7nr82A?t=118) [_really_](https://youtu.be/UDKz0NEW0J4?t=378) [like exploding things ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-twgG2U21hQ) [ and ](https://youtu.be/KQiEeodXfZE?t=420) [setting them ](https://youtu.be/dxjE9O0n6YI?t=365) [on fire. ](https://youtu.be/imVKSskCB4I?t=293)[ ^ ]

**Author's Note:**

> NaomiK, I was SO excited to be assigned you as my recipient and I really hope you like this.
> 
> Thanks to my beta Mousek, and to multiple friends who helped brainstorm, proofread, name things, etc.


End file.
